On a long car journey I started to think about the pictures the mind takes while moving from place to place.
There’s hundreds, if not thousands, of places I walk through, to, over and under as I go about my day-to-day business. I tend to look at the world as though looking trough a viewfinder, which I guess is a common malady for most photographers. I often see a scene and think to myself that there would be a good photograph to be taken there. Occasionally I’ll return with my camera and the scene will look the same but not have the same attraction for me to record it.

It’s not the variables that make me discount it, such as lighting and people. I don’t think this is failure of vision on my part, the elements that attracted my eye are still there. I do look for types; square blocks of colour, spaces separated by fences, empty car parks which is what initially catches my eye, on return they often are just an exercise in ticking a box and not what they should be: a scene I want to document.

When I click the shutter, I don’t do it for the sake of photographing, I do it to document a scene that fits in with my overall vision and views, often within my current body of work. These non-captured scenes are merely sketches. I don’t feel the need to record them once visited but perhaps actually seeing them is now part of my practice. It seems an odd concept that I become a better photographer through not taking a photograph but it seems to be right.